Legacy
by wytchunter
Summary: He didn't want to break his promise, but now it looked as if he had no choice.


Chack! Chack! Chack! The ostrich horse's feet stomped urgently on the ground; its talons frantically scratching at the dirt as if it were desperately trying to escape a monster. But it was not a monster that went after the hybrid creature; it was the Avatar, the world's savior and messiah. The Avatar, who kept the world in balance and saved lives. The Avatar, who needed to save Republic City from its greatest enemy, Yakone.

The city's most ruthless bloodbender urged the animal to go faster – "Yah! C'mon ya stupid ostrich-horse! On with it!" – and inside of him was much more desperation than the animal he was riding. He knew of the Avatar's ability; that he could take one's bending, permanently. He also knew that he'd used this ability on the ex-Firelord, ex-Phoenix King Ozai, and that it had ended him permanently as well. Not just his bending, but the man himself.

It was rumored that not long after having his bending was taken away, the former Firelord quickly became hopeless and immobile. It was as if the life was slowly being sucked out of him, as the reality that his bending was truly and forever gone set in more and more each day. Soon, Ozai had used his own hair to strangle himself and end his own misery. His son attended his funeral and looked torn; his brother with a blank face; his daughter unable to attend due to her most recent breakdown, and no Fire Nation official had bothered to come. Not even his ex-wife had attended, and the location of her hiding place had been long discovered.

Yakone feared this emotional and psychological drainage the most as he tried fervently to escape Avatar Aang. It had been no easy deed, taking over Republic City. He had not wanted to become a bloodbender initially; but after a firebender discovered his refugee father in the middle of their forest hideout, he had no choice but to learn a more advanced and dangerous form of waterbending. He had no mother to speak of, but as he shamefully ran off from his father's charred remains and deeper into the forest, he found a terrifying but fascinating woman by the name of Hama. Unlike Yakone, Hama had grown up in a community among other waterbenders, so that she had had a chance to learn real waterbending. But even though Hama had seen that Yakone's waterbending skills were poor due his family's isolation, she did not discard him as an impossible student. Instead, she quickly took him under her wing, due to his eagerness to learn.

Yakone had turned out to be something of a prodigy; with proper lessons, he caught on quickly. It was not too long before Hama introduced him to bloodbending, which he was very much afraid of. But Yakone was so grateful for Hama's hospitality and teaching lessons that he could not bring himself to reject her rather imploring offers, and so he became just as great as a bloodbender as he was a waterbender. Soon after Yakone had perfected both forms, he decided to set off on his own path. Hama let him on his way, but was sad to lose the closest thing she had to a prodigy and a son. She told him to make one promise to her, and one promise only: that he pass on his bloodbending knowledge so that the true power of waterbenders was never lost. He kept this promise to her, and took it to Republic City.

But now he found himself running away from that very threshold, he was found out and there was nothing he could do about it. Surely there was a way he could back to reclaim his precious city, but for now –

SNAP! The carriage suddenly split itself in half, throwing Yakone straight into the ground as the ostrich horse escaped its bondage. With Avatar Aang before him, Yakone spent no time getting up and preparing a bloodbending stance.

"This time I'm going to put you to sleep for good!" And he wasn't kidding. Yakone got to work on the Avatar's organs; twisting his body in unnatural shapes and causing his arms snap in a disturbing manner. Aang could feel his insides churning and crushing into each other in all the wrong ways. He could feel his joints bend in the opposite direction; his lungs closing before they could gain air; his head being forced left to right to left again. The Avatar felt himself slipping out of his grip, his panic possessing him just as badly as Yakone's bloodbending. Finally, finding just one last vestige of control inside of him, Aang begged for the other Avatars' help, and he then slipped into the Avatar state.

For Yakone the sight was utterly terrifying. He did everything in his power to gain some tidbit of control, but the Avatars were having none of it. In just seconds Aang had him pushed back and pinned him in between a pyramid of sharp rocks. Yakone struggled to move, but now he was the one without control. Aang came out of the Avatar state and step closer to Yakone, proclaiming that he was now going to take away his bending, for good.

This was the moment Yakone dreaded for the entire court trial; in fact, he'd dreaded this since the moment he heard Katara made bloodbending illegal. When he'd first heard about Ozai and his slow death, he'd been almost relieved to know the man responsible for his father's death and his necessity to learn the darker side of waterbending had suffered and was now gone. But then he realized that if the Avatar felt it was necessary to take one's bending, he could. And if his wife said that bloodbending was against the law, then it was. This meant that Yakone had one of the two choices: break his promise to Hama lest his bending be taken away, or carry on her legacy for as long as he could. He chose the latter, because he'd decided that he couldn't live with himself if he betrayed Hama, his only teacher, and his only hope.

As Aang put his finger to Yakone's forehead, he suddenly went into a flashback to when Hama was training him to bloodbend.

"You're an incredible bender, Yakone! I just know that you're the one who'll carry on this legacy, and show the world that we waterbenders are not as weak and defenseless as we look!"

"Hama, I…I don't know if I want to bloodbend…" Yakone released his bloody grip on the small and helpless porcurabbit. "I mean, I don't like hurting the animals. And bloodbending seems so…so…"

"Sadistic and wrong?" She sighed and gently put her shoulder on Yakone's. "Yakone, I know bloodbending seems like a scary and inhuman thing to do. But listen to me. What the Fire Nation does to us, what they do to the world? That's inhuman. The way they wiped out all of the airbenders, the way they can easily wipe out an entire tribe, the way they can take out a young boy's father with no conscious. That's inhuman, Yakone. What we bloodbenders do is not nearly as cruel and thoughtless as what they do. What they do, they do it because they want to watch the world burn and see everyone suffer. What we do? We do it because we want to empower our people, and take back what's ours."

"But…but isn't that just as bad as what the Fire Nation does?"

"It's different, Yakone. The Fire Nation does not know loss like we do." Even at such a young age, Yakone was not buying it. But every time Hama looked at him with pride, he could not help but show her what he could do, even if he felt absolutely cruel doing it.

He felt the Avatar's work drain his body of his power. All of his years of practice, all his determination and drive, the people in his mafia who once looked up to him and depended on him, his promise to Hama. Gone.


End file.
